The Transitional Style

When the Kandyan kingdom fell in 1815, the temple mural tradition might have ended with it. Instead, through the last decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, temple painters in the western and southern lowlands remade the old sacred art for a changed world. They kept the Jataka stories, the narrative registers and the devotional purpose of the Kandyan and Southern schools, and into them they brought the devices of the new age: three-dimensional architectural perspective, figures modelled in the round rather than stylised, and a theatrical dress and staging drawn as much from the Victorian and Bombay-Parsi stage, and from the Colombo Tower Hall, as from the temple. This is the Transitional Style, the bridge between the pre-modern mural and the modern painting that came after.

Its temperament is caught in a single detail from Kataluwa, where the traditional temple guardian stands holding a firearm. The murals at Kataluwa and at Karagampitiya are the surviving landmarks of the manner, and from the same moment came the first professional studio painters, Richard Henricus and his pupil Sarlis, who carried it into the printed art of the Buddhist revival. A separate, learned reaction ran alongside it, the neo-classic revival that looked back past the Kandyan school to the classic age of Sigiriya and Ajanta, and produced the Kelaniya murals of Solias Mendis and the temple work of George Keyt. The scholar Senake Bandaranayake gathers the whole body under a single word: neo-traditionalist, an old art reinvented rather than abandoned.